Re: mailmerge ends prematurely w/o error

Also, each of my data source files contains the header record as the first line. Does this ring any bells?

Not really, but it's possible that WOrd is using different methods to read the .txt files - with Word 2003 it would be a choice between its internal text converter, and an OLE DB provider. Although I would expect that it would /always/ read the same file using the same method, if your file content is changing over time, that method might change for each file from merge to merge. Precisely why that would cause a problem I do not know, but perhaps for example one method is leakier than another.

However, the chances are that that's a red herring.

--
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk

"christopher.allen" <"at workscape.com"> wrote in message news:%23C%23gdwa6HHA.4584@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks for your comments, I've tried the one-merge-per-invocation and that helps.

I'm running Word from a perl script, and I thought there might be some funny business going on with this setup, another reason I tried the one-merge-per-invocation thing. The perl script basically does this, once per data source file:

my $wrd = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application');
$wrd->Run($MACRO);
$wrd->Quit();

Another thing I thought of: my system has both Word 2000 and 2003 installed, so I'm wondering if there's any interference between the two installations. Running on a single-install system seems to help.

Also, each of my data source files contains the header record as the first line. Does this ring any bells?

Thanks again.

Peter Jamieson wrote:
Just an observation... my own experience of doing this kind of thing (which is rather outdated now) is that Word probably has at least one memory leak that will appear no matter how you split up a large merge. It may be worth trying to do multiple merges using a script that starts word, does the merge, closes word and so on, but that's not particularly easy either.

Unless you are having problems with specific .txt files...

Peter Jamieson


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